Women Must Unite to End War :: Feminism Feminist Women Criticism

War, war machines, jihad. These words have entered the vocabulary of everyday practice during the past twenty years. They mark a new stage in the discourse of Empire, what Hardt and Negri call a global project of network power, that knits the world together in a dynamic fabric of exchange, flows but also of conflict. 9-11 was a catastrophic example of the ways in which the threads in this fabric tighten and break. American citizens felt for the first time how the apparently innocent business of moneymaking in New York City and of policymaking in Washington DC are seen as criminal elsewhere. The daily deals struck in the financial and military-political capitals of the U.S. have direct and mostly negative consequences for most of the rest of the world. These consequences are invisible to the average American citizen, they are searingly obvious elsewhere. 9-11 has a long history going back through the Gulf War to the establishment of Israel in 1948. It is a history that spans the length of the Cold War and is witness to the growing suspicion and fear of U.S. policies in the region. Indeed, the last great battle of the Cold War took place in a dry dusty landlocked backwater called Afghanistan. Having been chosen for this showdown between the two superpowers placed Afghanistan squarely on the stage of world history. It is hard to know who got there first, to find the origins of the last great battle of the cold war. One version, which I find compelling, has it that when, on December 24, 1979, the Soviets invaded and took over rule of the country with the help of Afghan tribesmen in the north, they were not venturing into virgin territory. Six months earlier, President Carter had signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Zbigniew Brzezinski claims in a Jan. 15-21, 1998 interview for the French "Le Nouvel Observateur" that the U.S. government "didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would." The CIA recruited Afghan tribesmen separated from their birthplaces by war and displaced into dehumanizing refugee camps where religious education provided their only anchor. The U.S. government armed these men with guns and capitalist ideology and they won. The U.S. declared the Soviets defeated, the cold war over, and their warriors were left to fend for themselves.